At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday, April 25, watch for the social media accounts of 16 Orange County organizations that serve homeless men, women and children to go into overdrive when another Giving Day of virtual fundraising kicks into action.
The marathon online donation drive introduced here by Orange County Community Foundation in 2015 — called iheartOC — has been a smashing success. But this year, there’s a twist.
Instead of one daylong virtual event for hundreds of participating nonprofits soliciting donations for their myriad charitable missions all at the same time, the 2018 version will involve multiple Giving Days spread over the course of the next year or so. Each 24-hour online fundraiser will focus on a specific cause or group of people — homelessness, people with disabilities, senior citizens — and engage a collaborative group of nonprofits that provide services to those populations.
The first is the Help Them Home campaign to support 16 nonprofits that assist homeless people in different parts of the county: American Family Housing; Casa Teresa; Family Assistance Ministries; Families Forward; Family Promise of Orange County; Grandma’s House of Hope; HIS House; HomeAid OC; Mercy House; Orange County Community Housing Corp.; Pathways of Hope; Project Hope Alliance; South County Outreach; SPIN; Thomas House Family Shelter; and WISEPlace women’s shelter.
The collective goal: $500,000.
Donations can be made to a specific organization, or to the Help Them Home campaign in general to be distributed evenly among the 16 nonprofits. Some supporters have already stepped up with offers to match targeted amounts of donations.
Working with the nonprofit fundraising platform Funraise, Orange County Community Foundation has set up a landing page at help-them-home.funraise.org to go live at midnight Wednesday. Progress can be tracked in real time on the site.
The idea for the collaborative Giving Day grew out of a smaller effort last year among Families Forward, HomeAid OC and Thomas House.
After raising more than $1.8 million for 347 nonprofits in 2015 and then $3.2 million for 418 charities in 2016, iheartOC went on hiatus in 2017 so OCCF could retool the technology and promotional materials.
But Families Forward, HomeAid and Thomas House engaged with the foundation to help with a tightly focused Giving Day for them.
Thomas House executive director Natalie Julien said fundraising through iheartOC had been so beneficial that the nonprofit reached out to Orange County Community Foundation last year to figure out some way to keep that momentum going.
“We didn’t want to stop,” said Julien, in charge of a 32-year-old Garden Grove nonprofit that operates a 16-unit apartment complex where about 35 families a year find transitional shelter from the streets or motels. With a host of support services, Thomas House has a nearly 90 percent success rate assisting its clients in finding and improving employment prospects, saving money, and moving on to self-sufficiency.
Orange County Community Foundation facilitated the collaboration with HomeAid and Families Forward for a mini Giving Day last year.
The three nonprofits exceeded goals of raising $50,000 each. Including dollar-for-dollar matching donations, the individual amounts raised were: HomeAid, $91,320; Thomas House, $70,227; and Families Forward, $66,240.
“They were all cheering each other on,” said Carol Ferguson, senior donor relations and programs officer at OCCF who manages the Giving Day project.
The effort, involving ramped-up social media outreach and cross promotion among the three participating nonprofits, exponentially increased the one-day fundraising for Thomas House from $8,000 and $13,000 in 2015 and 2016, respectively, Julien said.
“Hopefully, again we’ll exceed expectations,” she said of the $50,000 goal for the upcoming Giving Day, which has already resulted in a $7,500 match challenge from Wahoo’s Fish Taco and another $10,000 challenge from an undisclosed individual.
There could be as many as 12 different Giving Days when all is said and done, said Shelley Hoss, president of Orange County Community Foundation, which is providing the online Giving Day platform, seed money and other support for promotional efforts.
The four other monthly events scheduled through August:
- May 31: Empowering Possibilities: A Giving Day for OC Neighbors with Disabilities (nine organizations; $175,000 goal)
- June 14: veterans and military (11 organizations; $75,000 goal)
- July 11: seniors (five organizations; $80,000 goal)
- Aug. 15: Boys and Girls Clubs of Orange County (15 organizations; $137,000 goal)
Said Hoss: “We hope the nonprofits come forward with proposals for other Giving Days.”
